Breakfast Fail

As one travels the Asian circuit being a jet-setting professional piece of "foreign talent", one morphs into a grumpy old man quite quickly. Small things which a tourist might not even notice rise the ire of the sensitive business traveller.

And no-one is more grumpy, more sensitive and more foreign than E@L.

Breakfast, especially when E@L's business discount hotel room does not include a voucher and he must pay for it, is the most important meal of the morning. When he is travelling on a holiday tour, it is of course the most important meal of the late afternoon.

E@L has lost a susbtantial percentage of his body-weight in recent months, not that you'd notice, and not into double figures yet. His method has been a regimen that may be familiar to many of you other fat pigs.

White food is evil. Avoid white foods like rice, noodles, potatoes, white bread and lark's tongues in vanilla flavored aspic. White foods generally have a high glycaemic index, you see and E@L's pancreas is on the cusp according to the eminent physician who is taking E@L's money to maintain his Ferrari.

His (E@L's, not the windswept Doc's) typical petit dejuener of choice these days has a core of fresh fruit with colored yogurt. Maybe some wholemeal or multigrain toast with some not quite white topping like Vegemite or peanut-butter (bought two jars of Really Good stuff in New Zealand last trip), or some bran or muesli with the fruit. This been working well to whittle promising amounts of the avoirdupois from his flanks.

So imagine his dismay here in the Metropark hotel in Macau when the Cafe de Ciao had:

• No yoghurt.

• No wholemeal bread.

• No meusli.

• Not much in the way of fruit (canned peaches and watermelon chunks).

• Terrible tea.

Desengaño again.

E@L

[Addendum: have only seen Vegemite out of Australia in an Australian owned hotel in Saigon.]